In 1970, Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act to ensure safe and healthful working conditions by creating and enforcing standards, providing training, outreach, education and assistance.
In order to enforce the standards created to protect our workers, OSHA levies fines against companies who are found to be in violation of OSHA law.
These penalties have remained unchanged for the last 25 years due to the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act of 1990. This act prevented OSHA from increasing its penalties due to inflation. However, President Obama signed the new budget into law on November 2, 2015 which contains an amendment that strikes the exemption.
OSHA is now required to increase its penalties to account for current inflation levels, the increase is expected to be approximately 80 percent. The new law requires this adjustment to occur prior to August 1st, 2016 and also grants OSHA the ability to adjust their penalties for inflation in each subsequent year.
OSHA has different levels of violation. The most egregious being ‘Willful and Repeat' followed by ‘Serious' and then ‘Other than Serious.'
For comparison's sake, here are how the proposed new penalties breakdown:
♣ Willful – $126,000 (increased from $70,000);
♣ Repeat – $126,000 (increased from $70,000);
♣ Serious – $12,600 (increased from $7,000); and
♣ Other Than Serious – $12,600 (increased from $7,000);
Naturally, as a business leader you realize that fines are secondary to the health and safety of your people. Still, in light of recent changes, we thought that this might be a good opportunity to meet with your safety representative and review the status of your compliance.
